Our Knowledge of God

p. 55

Do our doubts have a moral root? Are our “souls urged towards an irreligious life by a lack of self-control in the matter of pleasures and desires (Plato, Laws, 886a, b)?” Baillie’s comment: “Part of the reason why I could not find God was that there is that in God which I did not wish to find. Part of the reason why I could not (or thought I could not) hear him speak was that He was saying some things to me which I did not want to hear, . . .When we do not relish God’s commandments we are tempted to deny his being.”

p. 64

When the tortured seeker at last attains a clear faith (when the mists are cleared away) “the discovery he commonly makes is not so much a de novo discovery of God as the discovery that he has really been believing in God all along.” We are much more often disobedient than disbelieving.